OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An Extreme-Adaptive Time Series Prediction Model Based on Probability-Enhanced LSTM Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Forecasting time series with extreme events has been a challenging and prevalent research topic, especially when the time series data are affected by complicated uncertain factors, such as is the case in hydrologic prediction. Diverse traditional and deep learning models have been applied to discover the nonlinear relationships and recognize the complex patterns in these types of data. However, existing methods usually ignore the negative influence of imbalanced data, or severe events, on model training. Moreover, methods are usually evaluated on a small number of generally well-behaved time series, which does not show their ability to generalize. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel probability-enhanced neural network model, called NEC+, which concurrently learns extreme and normal prediction functions and a way to choose among them via selective back propagation. We evaluate the proposed model on the difficult 3-day ahead hourly water level prediction task applied to 9 reservoirs in California. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and exhibits superior generalization ability on data with diverse distributions.
FakeEdge: Alleviate Dataset Shift in Link Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Link prediction is a crucial problem in graph-structured data. Due to the recent success of graph neural networks (GNNs), a variety of GNN-based models were proposed to tackle the link prediction task. Specifically, GNNs leverage the message passing paradigm to obtain node representation, which relies on link connectivity. However, in a link prediction task, links in the training set are always present while ones in the testing set are not yet formed, resulting in a discrepancy of the connectivity pattern and bias of the learned representation. It leads to a problem of dataset shift which degrades the model performance. In this paper, we first identify the dataset shift problem in the link prediction task and provide theoretical analyses on how existing link prediction methods are vulnerable to it. We then propose FakeEdge, a model-agnostic technique, to address the problem by mitigating the graph topological gap between training and testing sets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the applicability and superiority of FakeEdge on multiple datasets across various domains.
Enabling Personalized Video Quality Optimization with VidHoc
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

The emerging video applications greatly increase the demand in network bandwidth that is not easy to scale. To provide higher quality of experience (QoE) under limited bandwidth, a recent trend is to leverage the heterogeneity of quality preferences across individual users. Although these efforts have suggested the great potential benefits, service providers still have not deployed them to realize the promised QoE improvement. The missing piece is an automation of online per-user QoE modeling and optimization scheme for new users. Previous efforts either optimize QoE by known per-user QoE models or learn a user's QoE model by offline approaches, such as analysis of video viewing history and in-lab user study. Relying on such offline modeling is problematic, because QoE optimization will start late for collecting enough data to train an unbiased QoE model. In this paper, we propose VidHoc, the first automatic system that jointly personalizes QoE model and optimizes QoE in an online manner for each new user. VidHoc can build per-user QoE models within a small number of video sessions as well as maintain good QoE. We evaluate VidHoc in a pilot deployment to fifteen users for four months with the care of statistical validity. Compared with other baselines, the results show that VidHoc can save 17.3% bandwidth while maintaining the same QoE or improve QoE by 13.9% with the same bandwidth.
Towards Generalized Open Information Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) facilitates the open-domain discovery of textual facts. However, the prevailing solutions evaluate OpenIE models on in-domain test sets aside from the training corpus, which certainly violates the initial task principle of domain-independence. In this paper, we propose to advance OpenIE towards a more realistic scenario: generalizing over unseen target domains with different data distributions from the source training domains, termed Generalized OpenIE. For this purpose, we first introduce GLOBE, a large-scale human-annotated multi-domain OpenIE benchmark, to examine the robustness of recent OpenIE models to domain shifts, and the relative performance degradation of up to 70% implies the challenges of generalized OpenIE. Then, we propose DragonIE, which explores a minimalist graph expression of textual fact: directed acyclic graph, to improve the OpenIE generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DragonIE beats the previous methods in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings by as much as 6.0% in F1 score absolutely, but there is still ample room for improvement.
A Charge Domain P-8T SRAM Compute-In-Memory with Low-Cost DAC/ADC Operation for 4-bit Input Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents a low cost PMOS-based 8T (P-8T) SRAM Compute-In-Memory (CIM) architecture that efficiently per-forms the multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations between 4-bit input activations and 8-bit weights. First, bit-line (BL) charge-sharing technique is employed to design the low-cost and reliable digital-to-analog conversion of 4-bit input activations in the pro-posed SRAM CIM, where the charge domain analog computing provides variation tolerant and linear MAC outputs. The 16 local arrays are also effectively exploited to implement the analog mul-tiplication unit (AMU) that simultaneously produces 16 multipli-cation results between 4-bit input activations and 1-bit weights. For the hardware cost reduction of analog-to-digital converter (ADC) without sacrificing DNN accuracy, hardware aware sys-tem simulations are performed to decide the ADC bit-resolutions and the number of activated rows in the proposed CIM macro. In addition, for the ADC operation, the AMU-based reference col-umns are utilized for generating ADC reference voltages, with which low-cost 4-bit coarse-fine flash ADC has been designed. The 256X80 P-8T SRAM CIM macro implementation using 28nm CMOS process shows that the proposed CIM shows the accuracies of 91.46% and 66.67% with CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 dataset, respectively, with the energy efficiency of 50.07-TOPS/W.
Graph Search based Polar Code Design
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

It is well known that to fulfill their full potential, the design of polar codes must be tailored to their intended decoding algorithm. While for successive cancellation (SC) decoding, information theoretically optimal constructions are available, the code design for other decoding algorithms (such as belief propagation (BP) decoding) can only be optimized using extensive Monte Carlo simulations. We propose to view the design process of polar codes as a graph search problem and thereby approaching it more systematically. Based on this formalism, the design-time complexity can be significantly reduced compared to state-of-the-art Genetic Algorithm (GenAlg) and deep learning-based design algorithms. Moreover, sequences of rate-compatible polar codes can be efficiently found. Finally, we analyze both the complexity of the proposed algorithm and the error-rate performance of the constructed codes.
Incorporating Multi-armed Bandit with Local Search for MaxSAT
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Partial MaxSAT (PMS) and Weighted PMS (WPMS) are two practical generalizations of the MaxSAT problem. In this paper, we propose a local search algorithm for these problems, called BandHS, which applies two multi-armed bandits to guide the search directions when escaping local optima. One bandit is combined with all the soft clauses to help the algorithm select to satisfy appropriate soft clauses, and the other bandit with all the literals in hard clauses to help the algorithm select appropriate literals to satisfy the hard clauses. These two bandits can improve the algorithm's search ability in both feasible and infeasible solution spaces. We further propose an initialization method for (W)PMS that prioritizes both unit and binary clauses when producing the initial solutions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the excellent performance and generalization capability of our proposed methods, that greatly boost the state-of-the-art local search algorithm, SATLike3.0, and the state-of-the-art SAT-based incomplete solver, NuWLS-c.
PatchMix Augmentation to Identify Causal Features in Few-shot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The task of Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to transfer the knowledge learned from base categories with sufficient labelled data to novel categories with scarce known information. It is currently an important research question and has great practical values in the real-world applications. Despite extensive previous efforts are made on few-shot learning tasks, we emphasize that most existing methods did not take into account the distributional shift caused by sample selection bias in the FSL scenario. Such a selection bias can induce spurious correlation between the semantic causal features, that are causally and semantically related to the class label, and the other non-causal features. Critically, the former ones should be invariant across changes in distributions, highly related to the classes of interest, and thus well generalizable to novel classes, while the latter ones are not stable to changes in the distribution. To resolve this problem, we propose a novel data augmentation strategy dubbed as PatchMix that can break this spurious dependency by replacing the patch-level information and supervision of the query images with random gallery images from different classes from the query ones. We theoretically show that such an augmentation mechanism, different from existing ones, is able to identify the causal features. To further make these features to be discriminative enough for classification, we propose Correlation-guided Reconstruction (CGR) and Hardness-Aware module for instance discrimination and easier discrimination between similar classes. Moreover, such a framework can be adapted to the unsupervised FSL scenario.
Novelty Detection for Election Fraud: A Case Study with Agent-Based Simulation Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we propose a robust election simulation model and independently developed election anomaly detection algorithm that demonstrates the simulation's utility. The simulation generates artificial elections with similar properties and trends as elections from the real world, while giving users control and knowledge over all the important components of the elections. We generate a clean election results dataset without fraud as well as datasets with varying degrees of fraud. We then measure how well the algorithm is able to successfully detect the level of fraud present. The algorithm determines how similar actual election results are as compared to the predicted results from polling and a regression model of other regions that have similar demographics. We use k-means to partition electoral regions into clusters such that demographic homogeneity is maximized among clusters. We then use a novelty detection algorithm implemented as a one-class Support Vector Machine where the clean data is provided in the form of polling predictions and regression predictions. The regression predictions are built from the actual data in such a way that the data supervises itself. We show both the effectiveness of the simulation technique and the machine learning model in its success in identifying fraudulent regions.
Data-efficient Modeling of Optical Matrix Multipliers Using Transfer Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We demonstrate transfer learning-assisted neural network models for optical matrix multipliers with scarce measurement data. Our approach uses <10\% of experimental data needed for best performance and outperforms analytical models for a Mach-Zehnder interferometer mesh.
Unsupervised Visual Defect Detection with Score-Based Generative Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Anomaly Detection (AD), as a critical problem, has been widely discussed. In this paper, we specialize in one specific problem, Visual Defect Detection (VDD), in many industrial applications. And in practice, defect image samples are very rare and difficult to collect. Thus, we focus on the unsupervised visual defect detection and localization tasks and propose a novel framework based on the recent score-based generative models, which synthesize the real image by iterative denoising through stochastic differential equations (SDEs). Our work is inspired by the fact that with noise injected into the original image, the defects may be changed into normal cases in the denoising process (i.e., reconstruction). First, based on the assumption that the anomalous data lie in the low probability density region of the normal data distribution, we explain a common phenomenon that occurs when reconstruction-based approaches are applied to VDD: normal pixels also change during the reconstruction process. Second, due to the differences in normal pixels between the reconstructed and original images, a time-dependent gradient value (i.e., score) of normal data distribution is utilized as a metric, rather than reconstruction loss, to gauge the defects. Third, a novel $T$ scales approach is developed to dramatically reduce the required number of iterations, accelerating the inference process. These practices allow our model to generalize VDD in an unsupervised manner while maintaining reasonably good performance. We evaluate our method on several datasets to demonstrate its effectiveness.
Active 3D Double-RIS-Aided Multi-User Communications: Two-Timescale-Based Separate Channel Estimation via Bayesian Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Double-reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising technique, achieving a substantial gain improvement compared to single-RIS techniques. However, in double-RIS-aided systems, accurate channel estimation is more challenging than in single-RIS-aided systems. This work solves the problem of double-RIS-based channel estimation based on active RIS architectures with only one radio frequency (RF) chain. Since the slow time-varying channels, i.e., the BS-RIS 1, BS-RIS 2, and RIS 1-RIS 2 channels, can be obtained with active RIS architectures, a novel multi-user two-timescale channel estimation protocol is proposed to minimize the pilot overhead. First, we propose an uplink training scheme for slow time-varying channel estimation, which can effectively address the double-reflection channel estimation problem. With channels' sparisty, a low-complexity Singular Value Decomposition Multiple Measurement Vector-Based Compressive Sensing (SVD-MMV-CS) framework with the line-of-sight (LoS)-aided off-grid MMV expectation maximization-based generalized approximate message passing (M-EM-GAMP) algorithm is proposed for channel parameter recovery. For fast time-varying channel estimation, based on the estimated large-timescale channels, a measurements-augmentation-estimate (MAE) framework is developed to decrease the pilot overhead.Additionally, a comprehensive analysis of pilot overhead and computing complexity is conducted. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed multi-user two-timescale estimation strategy and the low-complexity Bayesian CS framework.
Quantization-aware Interval Bound Propagation for Training Certifiably Robust Quantized Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We study the problem of training and certifying adversarially robust quantized neural networks (QNNs). Quantization is a technique for making neural networks more efficient by running them using low-bit integer arithmetic and is therefore commonly adopted in industry. Recent work has shown that floating-point neural networks that have been verified to be robust can become vulnerable to adversarial attacks after quantization, and certification of the quantized representation is necessary to guarantee robustness. In this work, we present quantization-aware interval bound propagation (QA-IBP), a novel method for training robust QNNs. Inspired by advances in robust learning of non-quantized networks, our training algorithm computes the gradient of an abstract representation of the actual network. Unlike existing approaches, our method can handle the discrete semantics of QNNs. Based on QA-IBP, we also develop a complete verification procedure for verifying the adversarial robustness of QNNs, which is guaranteed to terminate and produce a correct answer. Compared to existing approaches, the key advantage of our verification procedure is that it runs entirely on GPU or other accelerator devices. We demonstrate experimentally that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods and establish the new state-of-the-art for training and certifying the robustness of QNNs.
Be Careful with Rotation: A Uniform Backdoor Pattern for 3D Shape
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

For saving cost, many deep neural networks (DNNs) are trained on third-party datasets downloaded from internet, which enables attacker to implant backdoor into DNNs. In 2D domain, inherent structures of different image formats are similar. Hence, backdoor attack designed for one image format will suite for others. However, when it comes to 3D world, there is a huge disparity among different 3D data structures. As a result, backdoor pattern designed for one certain 3D data structure will be disable for other data structures of the same 3D scene. Therefore, this paper designs a uniform backdoor pattern: NRBdoor (Noisy Rotation Backdoor) which is able to adapt for heterogeneous 3D data structures. Specifically, we start from the unit rotation and then search for the optimal pattern by noise generation and selection process. The proposed NRBdoor is natural and imperceptible, since rotation is a common operation which usually contains noise due to both the miss match between a pair of points and the sensor calibration error for real-world 3D scene. Extensive experiments on 3D mesh and point cloud show that the proposed NRBdoor achieves state-of-the-art performance, with negligible shape variation.
Easy and complex: new perspectives for metadata modeling using RDF-star and Named Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2022
Year: 2022

The Resource Description Framework is well-established as a lingua franca for data modeling and is designed to integrate heterogeneous data at instance and schema level using statements. While RDF is conceptually simple, data models nevertheless get complex, when complex data needs to be represented. Additional levels of indirection with intermediate resources instead of simple properties lead to higher barriers for prospective users of the data. Based on three patterns, we argue that shifting information to a meta-level can not only be used to (1) provide provenance information, but can also help to (2) maintain backwards compatibility for existing models, and to (3) reduce the complexity of a data model. There are, however, multiple ways in RDF to use a meta-level, i.e., to provide additional statements about statements. With Named Graphs, there exists a well-established mechanism to describe groups of statements. Since its inception, however, it has been hard to make statements about single statements. With the introduction of RDF-star, a new way to provide data about single statements is now available. We show that the combination of RDF-star and Named Graphs is a viable solution to express data on a meta-level and propose that this meta-level should be used as first class citizen in data modeling.
SLAN: Self-Locator Aided Network for Cross-Modal Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Learning fine-grained interplay between vision and language allows to a more accurate understanding for VisionLanguage tasks. However, it remains challenging to extract key image regions according to the texts for semantic alignments. Most existing works are either limited by textagnostic and redundant regions obtained with the frozen detectors, or failing to scale further due to its heavy reliance on scarce grounding (gold) data to pre-train detectors. To solve these problems, we propose Self-Locator Aided Network (SLAN) for cross-modal understanding tasks without any extra gold data. SLAN consists of a region filter and a region adaptor to localize regions of interest conditioned on different texts. By aggregating cross-modal information, the region filter selects key regions and the region adaptor updates their coordinates with text guidance. With detailed region-word alignments, SLAN can be easily generalized to many downstream tasks. It achieves fairly competitive results on five cross-modal understanding tasks (e.g., 85.7% and 69.2% on COCO image-to-text and text-to-image retrieval, surpassing previous SOTA methods). SLAN also demonstrates strong zero-shot and fine-tuned transferability to two localization tasks.
Building Resilience to Out-of-Distribution Visual Data via Input Optimization and Model Finetuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

A major challenge in machine learning is resilience to out-of-distribution data, that is data that exists outside of the distribution of a model's training data. Training is often performed using limited, carefully curated datasets and so when a model is deployed there is often a significant distribution shift as edge cases and anomalies not included in the training data are encountered. To address this, we propose the Input Optimisation Network, an image preprocessing model that learns to optimise input data for a specific target vision model. In this work we investigate several out-of-distribution scenarios in the context of semantic segmentation for autonomous vehicles, comparing an Input Optimisation based solution to existing approaches of finetuning the target model with augmented training data and an adversarially trained preprocessing model. We demonstrate that our approach can enable performance on such data comparable to that of a finetuned model, and subsequently that a combined approach, whereby an input optimization network is optimised to target a finetuned model, delivers superior performance to either method in isolation. Finally, we propose a joint optimisation approach, in which input optimization network and target model are trained simultaneously, which we demonstrate achieves significant further performance gains, particularly in challenging edge-case scenarios. We also demonstrate that our architecture can be reduced to a relatively compact size without a significant performance impact, potentially facilitating real time embedded applications.